Hi my name is Deborah and I'm obsessed with reading - can you tell?! I don't think there's anything worse than reading a bad book, so hopefully my reviews will help you avoid doing just that! Thanks for visiting and enjoy reading!

I received The Water Room by Christopher Fowler from Transworld as part of their reading challenge. The idea is that you pick four books from a selection of twelve and they send you the first, which you read and then review before they send you the second, and so on. I picked The Water Room because it sounded like my kind of book – a sort of crime thriller with a mystery twist to it.

I had never heard of Christopher Fowler before reading this and so I had no idea that the book was part of a series. The Water Room is actually the second in the Bryant and May series of Mysteries. Having read it without this knowledge, I can safely say that it isn’t necessary to read the previous book to enjoy this one. Fowler introduces the characters and their circumstances at the beginning of the book sufficiently enough that you don’t feel that you have missed out.

Arthur Bryant and John May are octogenarian detectives who work in the fictional Peculiar Crimes Unit in London. I was a bit disappointed to learn that the unit was indeed fictional as I would have loved for it to have been a real thing. The unit is an offspring of the Metropolitan Police and takes on the bizarre crimes that are too time-consuming for the Met to investigate. In this particular story, the case involves an old lady who is found dead in her basement. Her death appears to be completely natural aside from the odd fact that she has a throat full of river water.